Articles

Navid Negahban

“I have friends in high school who went to the front line, they come back to school… or they don’t come back, and there’s a red tulip sitting in the chair next to you, and you know that the person is not coming back.”

Lisa Farjam

Conner Habib

“We pretend that sex is some sort of unified animal instinct and that everyone shares it. That’s true at some level, obviously, but our desires are our own. And they are little pathways into our consciousness.”

Anna Della Subin

Marina Warner

“My favorite present to give people used to be a seahorse. They cost twenty pence or something — in those days it was probably a florin — in a little shop that sold straw and raffia and natural products of that kind. For a long time I wanted to write about seahorses, because the male carries the baby.”

Omar Berrada

Documenta 13

One could argue that the thirteenth edition of Documenta, the Kassel quinquennial that ran for one hundred days last summer, was the most Bidoun ever.

Sohrab Mohebbi, Tom Francis, Clare Davies

Vishal Jugdeo’s Goods Carrier

Jugdeo’s video employs minimal means to inhabit his own outsiderness.

Aram Moshayedi

Zahi Hawass

“Revolution happened. The poor became rich, the rich became poor. The lady that used to have to look in the water to see her face, now she has a mirror. They raped the pyramids. The farmer who used to go to the field with an axe, now he goes with a gun. Three people leave their homes in the morning, two come back in the evening.”

Ursula Lindsey

Larry Gagosian

“I started selling posters because I thought I could make more money that way than parking cars. Simple as that. I saw somebody else selling posters and I basically just copied their business. It was a total lack of imagination.”

Negar Azimi

Jeremy Deller

“Genuine boredom… bloody hell, I remember boredom. It’s amazing! Sunday afternoon, on a wet Sunday afternoon, that’s when you sort of took to your bedroom and got your books out or something.”

Sukhdev Sandhu

Hossein Amanat

“One gets very impressed by the forms in Iranian architecture. One of the greatest messages is the sequence of volumes: how an outdoor space, say, can give you an impression of enclosure, and then you come to a smaller space, or a lower or higher space, the interrelations of different volumes and proportions — the time it takes to walk through, the amount of light you experience as you pass…”

Benjamin Tiven

Rokni Haerizadeh’s The Reign of Winter

When the sheets are all sewn together, the work will represent an unlikely, if not maudlin, take on this exploding piñata of privilege.

Negar Azimi

Tongues: Glossolalia going viral

Amid the rising, falling tide of gobbledygook the preacher would suddenly start to shout in Somali.

Nimco Mahamud-Hassan

The Imaginary Elsewhere: How not to think about diasporic art

The political import of these works has less to do with representation than with the pleasures and perils of storytelling, the effort to recast the everyday into mythical structures that speak to universal desires.

Media Farzin

Aliens: The Arabs of Bosnia and the War on Terror

Banners like Non-Alignment and Islam can be taken down and rolled up as circumstances dictate, but people often get left behind.

Darryl Li

Gulfiwood: Culture and society in South Asian Arabia

There is a body of cinema about life in the Gulf, that is consumed by the majority of the population of the Gulf, that requires no special pleading or state subsidy to exist — the popular culture of the Arab working class, most of whom happen to be Indian.

Sudarshan Purohit

Model UNESCO: A Roundtable: With Sarah Rifky, Nadia Ayari, Annabel Daou, Ranya Husami, and Mahmoud Khaled

American participation in the International Cairo Biennale has been wrongheadedly PC, expensive, beautiful, boring, and/or outright controversial.

Bidoun

Imprisoned Airs: A conversation with Salar Abdoh

In life, Reza Abdoh inspired all manner of fantastical tales.

Daniel Mufson

Haj to Utopia

They were drawn from a seemingly incoherent mix of -isms: pan-Islamism, Irish republicanism and Bolshevism.

Hussein Omar

The Colonel

In 2006, I was asked to address an audience in Tehran on the novels of Orhan Pamuk.

Christopher de Bellaigue

Notes on a Century

Alongside these formidable accomplishments, there is a Bernard Lewis who is reviled by leftish academia and who is surrounded by dubious sycophants.

Issandr El Amrani

Jumana Manna: The apparatus of the game

Here, the touch of her swim coach’s hand can stand in for all the sexual slippage of a woman coming of age in water.

Kate Sutton